Tag: Mixology
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Join us at the Fair Game Beverage Plant in lovely Pittsboro, NC for a very special one-off Easter Brunch with the highly anticipated local seafood restaurant Postal Fish Co. We will be crafting unique wild cocktails with Fair Game Beverage spirits to pair with the meal highlighting spring flavors by Postal Fish Co.
We’ll gather together at the Plant for an afternoon outdoors with cocktails, foraging, fresh local seafood and a celebration of the Spring season. Proceeds from the brunch will benefit Abundance NC’s work promoting local food and sustainability right here in Chatham County.
We will begin at noon with a cocktail hour that includes a short foraging walk and discussion, where you will help gather fresh wild greens and flowers for the salad. The meal begins at 1pm, family style, with Chefs James Clark and Bill Hartley preparing an incredible feast that portends downtown Pittsboro’s first sustainable seafood restaurant opening later in 2017, with desserts prepared by pastry chef Marcey Clark.
Fair Game Beverage and Piedmont Picnic Project will collaborate on three seasonally inspired cocktails featuring the wine and spirits crafted right next door.

Was there a time when the end of fall meant sitting around the fire with your family and friends… chatting, telling stories, or listening to someone play music… sipping a hot drink… while you cracked and picked the nuts you gathered all fall long… looking forward to preparing decadent treats with them for the holiday season? We will recreate that time here in downtown Raleigh! Reserve your ticket here.

This year marked our 2nd annual Hot Nuts & Cider gathering at Raleigh City Farm, and we were overwhelmed by the positive response from our partners, sponsors, and the local community.

Thank you too everyone who helped with the event and to all who came by, cracked nuts, drank cider, made an ornament, made or purchased a wreath, and huddled around the fire listening to some great bluegrass. See full gallery here.

For those of you who were asking about our candied pecan recipe, here it is!

Candied Pecans (on the stovetop or open fire)

-2 tbsp butter

-2 c pecans

-1/4 cup brown sugar

->Melt the butter over medium heat in a heavy-bottomed skillet (preferably cast iron if you are over an open flame).

Once butter is melted, add pecans and toss in butter to cover. Add brown sugar and stir so that sugar evenly coats pecans.

Once sugar takes on a molten liquid appearance (and no sugar granules are visible), pour pan contents out onto wax paper to cool. They will harden and candy as they cool.

Well, there it is! The secret is out! And if you want a great historical hot cider cocktail as recommended by the evening’s bartender, try this out…

The story goes that the Green Mountain Boys, who included Ethan Allen in their crew, were hanging out at a tavern in Vermont in 1775, drinking hard cider with shots of rum. The name of this not-so-fancy drink is a Stone Fence, and since it was the last thing these Green Mountain Boys did before crossing Lake Champlain to capture Fort Ticonderoga at dawn the next morning, it’s clearly what gave them the strength and American spirit to defeat the British. As we drank it at Hot Nuts & Cider, we used hot cider instead of hard, spiked it with NC-grown and distilled sorghum rum from Fair Game Beverage, and added a dash of Crude bitters to complement the flavors.

Pour rum and add bitters in your glass, then top with hot apple cider, preferably heated over an open fire. Can garnish with a foraged bitter orange or rose hips, especially if you’re drinking with Piedmont Picnic Project. Attacks on the British optional.

Special thanks to our partners and sponsors below! You each made this event more delicious, more fun, and/or more sustainable!

Was there a time when the end of fall meant sitting around the fire with your family and friends… chatting, telling stories, or listening to someone play music… sipping a hot drink… while you cracked and picked the nuts you gathered all fall long… looking forward to preparing decadent treats with them for the holiday season? That time can be now!

Have you bought your tickets yet?? How about entered your favorite mayo dish (potato salad? chocolate-mayonnaise cake? deviled eggs?) into our Mayo Dish Cook-Off? The prizes are from some great local businesses! Don’t wait! It’s time… and we can’t wait!

Learn to make wild cocktails, listen to music from a 100-year-old Victrola, and eat mayo delights all while hanging out on a farm in the middle of downtown Raleigh. What better way to spend your Saturday afternoon?

GET TICKETS HERE. In celebration of Piedmont Picnic’s first ever event and launch party one year ago – Cocktails & Mayonnaise – we’ll be hosting another cocktails and mayonnaise event as our one year anniversary party! What can you expect?

That’s right! We just got back from the beach, but don’t worry, we didn’t take the week off. To keep you entertained, while we were on vacation, we looked into things to forage on the beaches of NC… What did we find? We foraged seaweed for extra nutrients in the compost pile, picked sea rocket and wild roses, and made our own sea salt! All things you can try out next time you pop over to the beach. Check it out below.

Wild sea rocket… like arugula, but the leaves are more like a succulent…

Finally, our grand finale… If you are trying to eat more locally, how do you localize your salt intake? Well, if you live in the NC Piedmont, in less than 150 miles, you can make your own local sea salt! We just strained the seawater and then dehydrated it until nothing was left but the salt!

Special thanks to Papa Spuds for providing all of the honey for the event! If you’re interested in Papa Spuds local foods delivery service, they’ll waive your enrollment fee and give you $5 off your first order when you use the coupon code PICNIC.

I didn’t need a calendar to tell me spring had arrived in North Carolina… All I had to do was look out at my yard and the yards of so many others to see them blanketed in pink, purple, white, and yellow flowers! I love this time of year before people pull out their lawnmowers, while they are still letting their yards turn into little wild places! And even the smallest wild place can be a place to find some wild food.

Many of these flowers, including our featured plant today – violets – can seem so common that we take them for granted and ignore that they are just as beautiful as many cultivated flowers. Many of them are also quite edible and useful!

This idea of something so prolific and common that we forget what a treasure it really is reminded us of our 100 Miles in 100 Days campaign. To us, the 100 miles of Raleigh greenways are something we have often ignored and taken for granted, but as we explore them more and more of late, we see their value as wild places full of wild edibles and full of a rich natural and cultural history.

Where does Raleigh greenway history begin?

Speaking of wild places, they don’t all have to be remote locations, left undisturbed for generations to create a perfect, mystical balance of how nature should be. Your lawn, or the vacant lot down the road–or the edges of Raleigh’s greenway trails–all have things growing in them, right? But what a bummer it would be if there weren’t. If everything were paved over. Or plucked bare. Thinking of the Dust Bowl in the Great Depression? Or the Lorax? Pretty bleak.

When Raleigh was growing itself rapidly away from downtown in the 1960s and 1970s, voices began speaking out with concerns over what all the new construction and developments were doing to existing wild and natural spaces. Where were all the trees going? Or the people who loved them? And what about all the damn flooding?

The short version of a longer story is that City Council turned a report from a summer intern titled, “Raleigh: The Park with a City in It” into a reality.

The two main creeks, Walnut and Crabtree, would be protected to help manage the area’s floodplain, the surrounding wetlands would be a habitat for plants and animals, and the pathways would “give alternative to the automobile for short commuter trips” around the city. Ever since Central Park was created in NYC in the 1850s, there have been strong advocates for natural spaces within cities. However, the extent to which the Capital City Greenway is integrated into Raleigh’s business, residential, and other development was so unprecedented that it was considered the first citywide greenway system in the United States when it was begun in 1974.

Each section of the greenway has been added in the years since then, slowly working toward making them fully interconnected. As land is turned over to be cleared, or paved, it creates opportunities for new wild things to grow. Chances are, if you’re in Raleigh, you’re not much more than a few minutes away from a greenway trail at any moment. Which also means, you’re not much more than a few minutes away from discovering some of Raleigh’s coolest natural spots.

Plant Profile: Common Violet

One plant that is so common on the greenways (and probably in your lawn) this time of year is the common blue violet. Sprinkle a handful of these blooms on any plate, and you will take it straight into gourmet territory.

Description and Habitat. Violets like to grow in areas that are fairly moist, yet also offer some sun, which makes them bloom more prolifically. Look for heart-shaped, somewhat glossy leaves about four inches tall and five-petaled purple flowers about one inch across. Flowers have yellowish-white middles that are slightly furry. Some violets are white blossomed with faint purple veins in the petals and are just as edible and quite striking!

Harvest. Blossoms are present in early spring (late March to mid April), and are best harvested in the morning. Leaves stick around most of the year. They are best harvested when still very young and rolled up like a scroll.

Flavor and Use. Common violet flowers (unlike their more fragrant English violet cousins) have a very faint scent – almost undetectable. Their flavor is green tasting much like a salad green. Generally, their use is more for their striking purple color which lends itself to garnish dishes or to be infused in syrups and liqueurs. The leaves can be eaten raw or cooked – but when cooked can have somewhat mucilaginous qualities.

Violet Syrup

Place violets in a heat safe container such as the mason jar below.

Pour boiling water over the flowers – just enough to cover them. Place a lid/plate over the steeping violets and allow to sit for up to 24 hours for maximum extraction of that beautiful purple color (cat optional).

Drain violets, squeezing as much liquid out of the flowers as possible. Gorgeous, isn’t it? Measure your liquid.

At this point, you have two color options: pinkish-purple or bluish-black.

For bluish-black, warm your liquid with an equal amount of sugar (i.e., if you have 1 cup liquid, you’ll want 1 cup sugar) over low heat until sugar is fully dissolved. Do not boil. Pour into clean jar. The color will lose some vibrancy but stay more violet.

Alternatively, add a few drops of lemon juice before sealing, and it will regain vibrancy but be a more pink-purple color rather than blue-violet. This pinkish-purple shade is in the photo below (the other bottle in the background is a ground ivy syrup made in a similar way).

What to do with this gorgeous purple syrup with an oh-so-delicate spring green taste? Why not a cocktail? We call it shrinking not for it’s flavor, but because it seems to disappear so quickly!

Shrinking Violet Cocktail

To make, shake the following in a cocktail shaker over ice and strain into a martini glass:

Candied citrus peel is another tasty and relatively easy way to use up a “trash food” that is still full of flavor, and that is why we’re featuring this yummy confection in our Feasting in Times of Winter Scarcity series. Again, if we think back to a time when citrus would have been harder to get your hands on and therefore a very special treat when you had it… then it makes sense to use every bit! And the best way to make a special treat even more special is to turn it into the candied jewels below. Better yet, if you followed along with our Tale of Two Vins post, you can put your peels from that to work, yet again, reincarnating them into their third life!

The recipe below will work for virgin citrus peels, but it is even better with the ones that have been sitting in and absorbing that sweet, boozy slurry for a few weeks. Much of the bitterness will have already left them, and they’ll have picked up other flavors. Added Bonus: you don’t have to “waste” the alcohol they absorbed by just tossing them in the compost because it will all be part of the finished product here.

You can do this recipe with peels from any citrus fruit, but it is particularly tasty with the thicker peels of oranges and grapefruit (my personal favorite).

Candied Citrus Peel

citrus peels (soaked or unsoaked previously in booze, with or without pulp attached)

sugar

water

superfine sugar

Slice the peels into thin strips or “smiley faces” roughly 1/4-1/2-inch wide. If you prefer a thinner or less-bitter peel, you can scrape out some of the white pith at this stage. I generally like a meatier, slightly bitter candied peel, so I don’t scrape out much of the white pith. Particularly if you are using peels that have been previously used to infuse alcohol, much of that bitterness will already be gone anyway.

Place peels in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan.

If you are using virgin peels (not pre-soaked in alcohol), cover peels with water and bring to a low simmer for about 5 minutes. Dump off water, and repeat until the bitterness is reduced to a palatable level for you when you taste a peel. Then proceed to the next step. If you are using peels that have already been soaked in alcohol, you can skip this entire pre-boiling step.

Fill sauce pan with water until peels are covered about one inch, measuring how much water you add. Then add an equal amount of sugar (i.e., if you needed 4 cups of water to cover the peels, add 4 cups of sugar for a 1:1 ratio).

Bring to a very low simmer, and continue to simmer until peels are translucent. If at any point the syrup becomes too thick or caramelizes to be darker than the color of straw, add water. This will take about an hour. To test if peel is done, remove one, allow it to cool, and see if you can bite through it easily. You will notice a visible change in the appearance of the peels and liquid when they are ready, with both becoming very glossy.

Remove the peels from the syrup and allow to dry on a wire rack overnight or until no longer sticky. Look at these fatties below – this is why I leave my pith in for maximum absorption potential. Be sure to put a pan or wax paper under the rack, or you will have some tough-to-clean counters!

TIP: Reserve the syrup for later use as a citrus-flavored simple syrup.

The next day, toss the peels in superfine sugar until coated. Some sources recommend to even let the peels sit in the sugar overnight or even indefinitely to dry out further and allow any remaining gooeyness to fully absorb the sugar. If you plan to store them more long-term, this may be a good idea. As a bonus, it will give you some citrus-scented sugar to use in the future. If you plan to store them directly in your belly, this is less necessary.

Store in an air-tight container in the pantry. Peels will keep indefinitely if allowed to dry properly (but they may mold if not completely dry before storing). If in doubt, eat within a couple of weeks or store in the refrigerator.

Now that you have them, how can you use them?

Dip one end of the peels in chocolate and serve with coffee or dessert.

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